Thursday, May 09, 2013

I kind of feel bad about all these Dirty Beaches posts but seriously if I cared about being popular I would lie and say that all those shitty San Diego bands out there are actually good and people would love me. So fuck it. I wanted to post the VICE review because Vice Magazine was def. an influence on me prior to starting a music blog, getting involved in putting out records and even though they are kinda corporate now I still pay attention to what they are doing. Here is the review:

Fuck singles: 2013 is the year of the double album. If you liked Alex Zhang Hungtai’s recent record Badlands, then pick this one up too. If Badlands was a gaggle of greasers trapped in the echoing carburetor of a ’57 Chevy, then Drifters is that Chevy logging its 248,000th mile on the freeway in 1983, and Love Is the Devil is it being compacted at a scrapyard in 2007. If Badlands took your aunt to Lovers Lane to park in the dark, then Drifters brought her to a divey disco instead, and Love Is the Devil wouldn’t have had the guts to take her out at all. If Badlands were a fluorescent tube light, then Drifters is an early-model, off-color LED, and Love Is the Devil is a dimmed bulb humming on its lowest wattage. Whatever. This double album is really good, and Alex Zhang Hungtai rules. (VICE MAGAZINE)

Oh also the RIAA has revised their sales calculations to credit 10 song specific streams as an album sale, so as of now Dirty Beaches Badlands has "sold" 50,000 units. Is that good? Gold is half a million. Anyway, I'm just going to go for it with Dirty Beaches posts. Fuck it.

Sunday, May 05, 2013

Jenifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games. I get to use this picture because Katniss was named after the main character in Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Book Review
Far From The Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
p. 1874

I'm struggling to find an angle for the five or so Thomas Hardy books I'm going to be reading over the next several months. Hardy, along with George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, was a quintessential Victorian period Novelist, both in terms of his rural subject matter and voluminous output. Although Far From The Madding Crowd was published in the 1870s, the action appears to take place 20-40 years prior, in the rural district of Wessex. Wessex was the fictionalized location for many of Hardy's novels, and it proved to be a popular invention.

Far From The Madding Crowd echos prior books by Trollope and Eliot in terms of the rural setting. Elements of the plot also feel familiar. The story of Far From The Madding Crowd concerns Bathsheba Everdeen and her bad marriage decisions. Wooed by a hustling young farmer in the first act, she turns him down flat. After inheriting her own farm from an Uncle, she turns down a more established farmer in the second act, and instead falls for a solider, who turns out to be a wastrel. The soldier ends up disappearing on her, and in his absence she agrees to marry farmer number two. Then soldier returns, and farmer number two kills him and is imprisoned for the murder, leaving Bathsheba Everdeen free to marry farmer number one, who she should have been with all along.

The idea of pairing a rural marriage drama with a dramatic final act murder is a device that appears to have been developed in the Victorian period as "serious" Novelists considered a way to increase the popular appeal of their work with a mass audience. Far From The Madding Crowd most resembles George Eliot's Adam Bede in this regard. Adam Bede, published in 1859, centered around the dramatic child murder and subsequent imprisonment of teen mom Hetty. Unlike Bede, in Far From The Madding Crowd the murder is more a plot device to resolve the marriage story. In Bede, Eliot spent much of the third act dealing with the trial, imprisonment and attempts to avoid the execution of Hetty.

When reading the "serious" novels of the 1860s ad 1870s, it is important to understand that sensationalist novels were also hugely, hugely popular at the same time. No doubt Hardy felt pressure to deliver excitement within the framework of his pokey rural drama, and you can't do much better then a murder.

I'm having trouble getting motivate for the next 40 years of literature. 10 years of this guy, and then after the century barrier I get a decade of Henry James. Really dreading Henry James.